AppExchange

Yesterday, I used Content Delivery to send a pdf to a client. Simple, right? Upload the Word document to Content, associate it with a record, and deliver the content. Surely if I upload a new version, the delivery will refer to the latest version, right? There’s no place to select that option, so I can assume, right? Wrong. This is the screen I see when I choose to deliver a given file. Note that I can choose whether to allow access to the original file or only to a pdf… but nothing about which version to deliver. (There are 4 versions right now.) The document in question needed some changes, so I uploaded a new version and told the client that the old link would still work. Oops. By default, Content Deliveries are set to refer to one specific version of a Content file. I can understand this, but surely […]

I make no secret that I’m a fan of PersonAccounts. I think they’re very handy when working with individuals instead of companies, and I really like pairing them with the Relationship Groups app to make households. I’ve always considered them as mostly-contacts. I put all Person fields on the Contact object, reserving very few for the Account object. But for some reason, I’ve usually used Billing Address as the primary address and Mailing as the secondary. No reason – that’s just how I’ve done it. That all changed yesterday. I was prepping to demo a system to a company and decided to click the “Request Update” button to send a Stay-In-Touch email. This is not a customizable email (well, not much) in terms of the fields from the Contact that it displays, so it used the Mailing Address. Oops! From now on, I am using Mailing and Other addresses for […]

With Dreamforce 2010 behind us and Dreamforce 2011 fast approaching, the first ever crowdsourced conference application is publicly available! Chatter BINGO has been released as an unmanaged package, meaning that all the source code is open and ready for customizing to your hearts’ content. Chatter BINGO was conceived by Chris Shackelford and Brad Gross (@imperialstout) while chattering in the Dreamforce org, and they asked me to build it. Within two weeks, it had passed QA and was deployed to the org. One of my favorite moments from Dreamforce was at the Tweetup (#df10tu – see you at #df11tu) when someone walked up to me with a printout of the PDF BINGO card she had generated, asking me to mark myself on the page. It always feels good to see people enjoying one’s work! The listing is at http://www.x2od.com/getchatterbingo. Enjoy!

The field Event.Type (which is sort of the same as Task.Type) is a difficult field to use. Here are a few reasons: Type cannot be the controlling field for a dependent picklist. On an Event list view (/007), even when specifying record type, the Type field cannot be edited. Salesforce requires you to select a default value for this picklist, as well as a default value for inbound emails... yet when I bcc my Email-To-Salesforce address, the resulting tasks have no Type value. A tweet by Andy Ognenoff of Manpower (@aognenoff) revealed another limitation: Type is not available in Custom Report Types. That does it! I'm done with this field. Here's my solution. Work in a sandbox (duh) Create a picklist field on Activity (ActivityType__c). Disable all Activity workflow rules, Chatter feeds, triggers, etc. Using DataLoader, copy values from Type to ActivityType__c. Using Field Level Security, hide Type from all […]

This is a collaborative post with Nick Hamm (@hammnick), Director of Technology at Infowelders and David Schach (@dschach) from X-Squared On Demand. After a conversation via twitter, we decided to collaborate on a blog post (via Google Docs, of course) and are publishing it in our own blogs simultaneously. With all of the hype around the pending release of iPad2 and how it has firmly moved us into the “post-PC era”, we had to take a step back and evaluate for ourselves whether all of the hype is justified, or if Steve Jobs’ mastery of the emotional sell has hypnotized Apple fan-boys and non-fan-boys alike into believing that we are in a reality that isn’t quite real, or even realistic. The Case for iPad The iPad is a game-changing device in many ways, but it’s main impact is as a consumer/personal technology. Apps are the primary driver that sell the […]